ABSTRACT
During the “Springtime For Hitler” production number in The Producers (Brooks, 1968), an audience of Broadway first-nighters sits stunned and gaping-mouthed amid chorus lines in SS-dress piping praise for the Führer in swastika formations. Disgusted spectators stomp out, one blurting, “Well! Talk about bad taste.” Moments later, the remaining crowd realize that “Springtime” deliberately aspires to what Susan Sontag calls the “good taste of bad taste”: the blending or inversion of high and low taste categories, as well as a perverse delight in cultural works historically defined as “low” (Sontag 1966, 291; Taylor 1999, 51-52; Betz 2003, 202-203). The Producers remains one of the most memorable tributes to the good taste of bad taste (or goodbad taste) in 1960s cinema, but it is not the first. Three years earlier, the sex comedy What’s New Pussycat? (Donner, 1965) offers one of the first instances of when the “official” voices of film interpretation perceive a mainstream film intentionally to aspire to good-bad taste: as “camp” and “cult,” among other trendy terms circulating. These labels also signify particular avatars of good-bad taste, namely urban bohemians, gays, and rebellious youth. My argument is that What’s New Pussycat? poses a dual menace to culture critics in 1965: the threat of jettisoning traditional, bourgeois conceptions of high and low culture and the related hazards of intermingling “low” taste publics with the mainstream. The larger argument of this chapter pertains to how scholarly histories approach this “talk about bad taste.” Histories of bad taste, cult, and camp in the USA from the 1960s onward usually undertake the “marginal” method. Marginal histories tend to delimit the scope of study to one disenfranchised subculture, its oppositional activities, and, in some cases, its relationship to mainstream culture. Andrew Ross unpacks camp sensibility, for instance, as the separate expression of gay culture and the youth counterculture (1989, 135-144, 148-165). William Paul privileges youth culture when discussing politicized challenges to cultural hierarchies, from the “Dirty Words” movement to Hollywood movies (1994). Sasha Torres’s and Barbara Klinger’s
studies of mass camp treat gay, subcultural camp as the authentic original by contrast to its mainstream absorption and “de-gaying” (Cleto 1999, 16-22; Feil 2005, 166-169; Klinger 1994, 139-140; Tinkcom 2002, 187-194; Torres 1999, 339). These and other studies de-emphasize the “dialogues” among minority taste publics and foreshorten investigation into the margins within the mainstream. The talk about bad taste that pervades mainstream culture of the mid-1960s forces a reconsideration of this framework. The popularizing of good-bad taste occurs through the interplay of a number of marginalized taste publics, namely African-Americans, gays, and young people, but crucially involves recalcitrant members of the mainstream who take “part-time” interest in these marginalized groups and sensibilities (Gans 1999, 110, 123; Taylor 1999, 87-88). Investigating these events requires inquiries into the intersections of marginalized groups and tastemakers, a dialogic conception of the margins and the mainstream, and a reconsid-
eration of majority culture as more than just oppressive or cooptive toward minority culture and sensibilities.1
